Pages

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

here comes a brand new guide on an interesting topic: CPU frequency scaling. Not many of you may know that on newer generation Intel CPUs (Ivy-Sandy Bridge) the kernel governor may decide the most suitable frequency in a plethora of them. In my case, for example (i7 3720QM), I can range from 1200MHz to 3600MHz in steps of 100MHz. This might be exciting, but changing CPU frequency costs a little energy at every transition.
Furthermore it happens that in several high-end CPUs, which are the more power consuming too, they cut the lower boundary to 1200MHz, while the real minimum is 800MHz.
In this advanced guide I want to introduce you how to modify your BIOS to fully control CPU frequency steps.